Post Your Comment

93 Comments

Super, so because MS Vista has a really bad and stupid CPU scheduler, AMD had to disable perfectly legit and smart power saving feature = CnC per core rather than per chip. I really love windows! I expect that CnC per-core caused no problems under linux for example.... Reply

All this bickering and nick picking—when to me the solution seems simple.

All the poor folks clamoring about numbers they COULD NOT EVER POSSIBLY tell the difference if using Intel Vs AMD in a dboule-blind test! None of you can tell the measurable diffs in FPS and temp. It's all little programs with numbers telling you there's a difference. So wtf is all the fus about?

Phenom-II is for people that already have an old AM2 rig and want to upgrade. But you forget that your old, slow ass mobo chipset and antiquated ram wouldn't even come close of a newer Intel system period.
A Brand NEW Phenom-II would "compete," but it barely does that. And as prices drop Phenom-II is losing even more ground as someone with an intel 775 can spring for a fast Quad-core, while you're stuck with the SAME OLD MOBO and RAM DERRRRR?
Stop all the nit-picking and bemoaning over Intel.

Does it make sense to scrap your current AMD rig for a completely new Intel unit?

YES = If you're doing video/AV editing and plan on getting an i7/i5 or if you’re not broke!

NO = If you currently have an AMD and need some extra horse-power.

But to falsely rationalize your purchase/mindset by suddenly putting the i7 into the "it's SO expensive" BS category; you're BROKE, you have no say about price. Get a real job and stop spending money on other nonsense and SAVE up like smart people do. It's YOUR own fault you cannot afford a damn $1100-1400 computer: that's NOT a lot. Just b/c YOU cannot afford it doesn't mean there's something "wrong" with i7.

You're comparing a 2yr old Q6600 against AMD's newest unit LOL? That's like a car magazine comparing the newest lambo to a 2 year old Ferrari etc. BUT PRICE OMG... Prices steadily go DOWN, thus folks with 775 can still upgrade to 6700, 6800 and so forth.

I'm glad AMD is "sort of" showing a rally to CATCH UP... BUT... when you buy into INTEL you're buying into a PROVEN ROADMAP OF PERFORMANCE VS AMD: you're buying into a mystery grab-bag of performance PROMISES.

Geesh. Just get the Phenom-II if you cannot afford the i7. Nobody with sense is talking about going from a Q6600/9xxx to 2 year behind the pack Phenom. This is just sophomoric nonsense.

Common-sense would tell you:

1) GET A BETTER JOB (education/certs etc)

2) Stop spending money on other hobbies and misc junk

3) STFU already and improve your financial situation, THEN you have a say. It's YOUR fault you don't have enough for a paltry $1200 machine. WHO doesn't have $1200? If you don't you haven't EARNED the right to complain. Complain b/c it's someone else's fault - I'm betting it's mostly your own lack of saving & discipline that's the problem.

None of you may like or agree w/me, but guess what? I don't care b/c I HAVE $1200 to spend so Fsck it I'm happy. Stop drinking, doing drugs, going out, blowing money on cable-TV and crap, for a change? Most of you are guilty of 1 or more of these frivolities.

Honestly THINK about what you’re saying here? You’re complaining about a superior i7 that is too expensive to do WHAT— play some damn video games? So your rationale is to do what? Buy a new or CPU upgrade to do the same? So THUS instead of continually saving to get the best… You BLOW your loads for inferior technology… and so the cycle continues. You’re NOW BROKE AGAIN and behind. Maybe you’ll start saving once again and come out of the wood work 2-3yrs later and STILL be complain once again “OMG it’s TOO EXPENSIVE” “I’ll by the cheap crap instead!”

It ain't the money. I know. I have money. I also have a lambo a porche and an evo. I like testing AMD because they give us "certified" techs something to tinker with and work on. AMD is a brand for builders and true techs like to tinker with a processor and see how far it can go. Even when I was in high school I owned 486's which were the latest and greatest that time. I had an INTEL PC and it sucked dirt once Microsoft came out with windows. Maybe Intel is ahead now but AMD is catching up. They can create the ultimate processor but they don't have to. Not yet.

BTW, watch how you talk. Be considerate. It ain't the money man. I can afford to buy as many alienware pc's I want. But I don't. Am I a gamer? Yes! I have a powerful system now and am happy I did not spend a lot of money on it. See, this is the thing. If you are smart you just don't want to buy the fastest CPU and fastest RAM that comes out. It's like buying an PS3 for $6,000.00 on ebay just because you want to be the first to play it. That is stupid.

People buy AMD because they are tweakable. They try to buy the cheapest parts out there, tweak it, and see how far it can go. Makes sense?

So what if you have the fastest computer in the world. If you don't use it everyday you just wasted money.

I know that we should look at relative sysmark scores, but I'm still puzzled by the higher scores in this batch of tests, compared to those done in April 2008.

For example the top performer from April - Core 2 Duo E8400 got a score of 161 on Overall in April 2008, and 191 in Jan 2009. The X4 Phenom 9750 went from 126 to 148. Other CPU's in both tests had similar differences. That's a bigger percentage difference than what gets used to debate whether Intel or AMD is better.

omg this is horrid. How do these $230-$270 CPUs compare to an $85 E5200 coupled with a $105 Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R? That combo will easily overclock to 3.8 Ghz on stock cooling. CPU, mobo + RAM all for less than the cost of a Phenom II. And better performance too. Reply

Great comments Aranthos! AMD did a great job with Phenom II, no doubt about that.
Anandtech review is kind of fair and balanced when it comes to giving the final verdict, but the tests are deceiving and unfair as usual.
First of all, as somebody else has already pointed out, they used an average mobo to test Phenom II, while they used expensive enthusiast level mobos for Core2 Quad and Core i7 (230 and 250 Dollars respectively). They could not find an Asus M3A79-T (which is much cheaper at 185$) There is no excuse for that! Either a deliberate move not to show what Phenom II can deliver at its best, or Anand needs to learn a lot from us. Just check the below link to see the performance difference between 790GX and 790FX. Quite some performance difference in some benchmarks and consider that it is still a close competition with an average AMD motherboard.
There IS a difference apparently: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/795/5/">http://www.legitreviews.com/article/795/5/ and it would change some conclusions
And now introducing a classic: Why Core2 Quads run on DDR3 (Yeah, all Core2 Quad users definitely switched to DDR3, lol!) and Phenom IIs run on DDR2? To show the best of Core 2 Quads... So what happens if DDR2 is used also on Core 2 Quads? See yourself below. X4 940 beats Q9550 most of the time and even Q9650 in some applications.
http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2009/01/08/amd-ph...">http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2009/0.../amd-phe...I wander what trick they will do with RAMs, when Phenom II AM3 (with DDR3) comes this February.
Anand says X4 940 trails Q9650 and by 28.4% when it comes to Far Cry 2. Is it so? Or? Check the above link again. Even with DDR3 RAMs Q9650 leads by only 4.4%. With DDR2, X4 940 leads this time, with a little margin. Same resolution! Who to beleive?
And check the link of very respectable "Guru of 3D" yourself, X4 940 beats Core i7 940 in higher resolutions. He he!
http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-phenom-ii-x4-920...">http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-phenom-ii-x4-920...So what? Don't get fooled, don't get deceived by the "big brother connections".
Final words: Yes I am a fan boy and I don't pay a penny for Intel!
Reply

I wonder why so many people keep saying "What happened to the AMD from the Athlon64 era? It was whupping Intel!" etc.

That AMD is still here. The same AMD that so long ago brought us Hypertransport, the integrated memory controller, native dual-core and the like brought us native quad-core and a three level cache heirarchy a full year before Intel did either. As it turned out, Intel did it better - a fact with which I won't even try to argue. However, AMD is still working.

P1 flopped. It was the most hyped chip in years, and brought all sorts of false promises. All Deneb promised was better overclocking, lower power consumption and more clock-for-clock performance. It did all 3.

I'm not going to say Intel ripped off AMD by using an IMC and a HT-esque high speed interconnect. Granted, AMD did it first, but Intel would have ended up doing it ANYWAY because it is a good idea.

Back to the original topic - we still have the old AMD with us. They're still innovating as always. But, we have a new Intel. One that isn't peddling crappy Netburst chips. New Intel is going out guns blazing, and they have the money to make sure that another P4 doesn't happen.

AMD got lucky back in the P3 -> P4 era. They're gonna have to either pull out a win of epic proportions, or stick to razor thin margins on their chips. Intel has seriously deep pockets, and can easily afford to destroy AMD's prices.

i7 is epic win. But I'm buying a Deneb anyway. Yeah, people are gonna call me a fanboy, and so what. I'm buying a chip made by a company that is facing a company over 50x their size. While they're not a little family run business, I will support them to their dying breath because they need every sale they can get. I like high performance as much as the next guy, but if buying higher performance (in my case at a higher price [I have an AM2+ motherboard]) puts the business a step closer to being one-sided, then Intel can suck it. They don't need my money. Reply

Well, it's not quite a 4800 series equivelent release this time. More like being around the same as the 3800 series was. A good improvement over the hd2000 series cards, in this case a good improvement over the phenom 1.

On the other hand I am wanting to see what will happen with the AM3 versions. Should improve scores quite a bit on anything that likes memory speed and bandwidth. I'm also wondering what other optimizations will come with AM3. Gonna wait for that, since I should be getting another nice quarterly bonus around the time those come out. Use a pII 945 on my old k9a2 plat till I can get an AM3 board and DDR3 memory. Reply

This was a great step forward by AMD. After the Phenom flop they had to transition successfully to 45nm or basically fold. They have done that. AMD doesn't have the resources to compete with Intel on the highend right now, but with this release they can compete in the mainstream market where most processors are sold.

They're using the same strat that worked for the 4xxx series video cards, performance per dollar.

P2 is against C2. End of story. You cant sit around theorizing some magical item is going to get a P2 anywhere close to the i7.

Stop defending AMD. They have 18 months of catchup to do and dont need pats on the back and excuses from people like you. They have a good chip and alot of good things in the chip that they dont need to do in the future as they come up with new architecture. Reply

I generally buy AMD processors for two reasons. The first is that I am not a gamer so I'm looking for cost-effective business application solutions. I'd rather double the memory than increase the processor speed, so AMD works well at the price points I build to.

Secondly, I believe in the need for competition. With the power PC processor virtually absent from the consumer market and there being little else to choose from for the desktop market, AMD is Intel's only real competitor. So long as AMD has chips that are good enough to compete with Intel's on price/performance, I prefer to buy them.

If Via got their Cyrix processors up to a decent speed, I might be tempted to switch to them, but let's face it, they don't really compete in this market. So in a two-way race, we need to put our money behind the underdog to prevent a monopoly.

I've been buying ATI cards too for similar reasons. Nice to see that AMD's making advances in both areas.

To be clear, I've got nothing against Intel, at least not since the Pentium fiasco, but I think everyone will agree that having multiple firms competing is better for consumers than having one company dominate (Windows 95, 98, Millenium Edition, Vista come to mind). :) Reply

Both can't be true. Explanations would be highly appreciated. I suggest, that anandtech ask techspot about the test settings. Blender is capable of using several threads but I'm not sure wether the optimization is automated. Please, play with the settings. For example, 8*8 (render) tiles can benefit from 8 threads while 1*1 can't.
Reply

How much money has paid Intel to you for this "testing"? You have tested productivity of processors only on two games. In both games productivity of Core 2 is above. In one of them much more above, but it happens seldom. Other tests show, that productivity of Core 2 Quad in part of games is above. In part of games productivity Phenom II of same frequency is above. Why there is so a lot of coding and synthetic tests where Intel is faster, and as always there are no other applications? Why you continue to say lies, as earlier liars for money of Intel that Northwood is ostensibly faster, than Barton. Reply

Bit disappointing that it's still slower than Core2 clock for clock. But given the performance of the original Phenom, I think the CPU performs as expected. A big leap for AMD. Unfortunately for them, Intel made an even bigger leap when they switched from Netbust to Core2.

Also a bit concerned about this supposed "backwards compatibility". Many of the original 790FX boards, my M3A32-MVP Deluxe in particular, will not work with AM3 CPUs because Asus does not plan on releasing a BIOS update. Of course that's the fault of second-rate mobo companies like Asus, and not the fault of AMD. I'll probably end up getting a DDR2 PII-940 to replace my X4 9650, but I'll wait until the prices have dropped some. Reply

AMD has gone a long way to improving the performance of its processors, and everyone should go out and buy them. They need our support, and without it we will have to put up with whatever Intel decide to give us. And everyone here I think remembers the P4 days, let them not come again!
The AM2 /2+ /3 platform is by far the easiest upgrade option. No need to worry if your NB chipset supports the latest FSB or RAM, because its all integrated into the CPU. A feature than Intel has copied in its new i7. Along with the monlithic quad core design, and level 3 cache. Also do not forget that AMD released the first x86-64 CPU, and intel basically complied to its x86-64 code to be compatible with the software developed for it.
i7 is fast, very fast. But do you need that kind of performance in your everyday life? i7 is designed for workstation's hence the benchmarks of video encoding and 3D applications. Gamers would be better off getting a top of the line GPU. Is your CPU 100% utilized 24/7?
I saw a comment about the 2 year old Core 2 Quad being faster, only in Far Cry 2, that one test. And I would rather play Crysis anyday.
Since its release Intel has tweaked the performance of these with new cores no end.

1. Most people use their everyday system to *work* too.
2. Dont compare i7 to P2. Youll just look like youre really reaching and a fanboy.
3. You dont -Need- anything better than a A64 for everyday tasks. Depending on how long you wanna wait though, you will go to a better system. That point about not -needing- better hardware has always been ridiculous and only applies to grandmas and people that use the computer for browsing and music. Those people dont care about this area in computer so its moot!

P2 is great, but be realistic. Its competing against C2 right now. Comparing technicalities and -who was firsts- doesnt provide more FPs in anything. It just makes for flame fodder. The numbers speak for themselves and I think this article did a good job in putting the P2 in its place. As a great alternative for people looking to upgrade from older than C2 hardware. Reply

For less than $20 more the i7 920 looks like it wins in every single test by a fair margin, doesn't seem like this is really all that competitive, considering the i7 is still in the "high price" phase. I can't believe it wont drop to the $275 mark rather soon which would put the XII 940 back to the same position the original Phenom was, too little too late. Reply

How you figure? By the chart on page 4, it is less than $200. Even if you go for one of the $300 motherboards, you won't see a $400 difference.

When I built my current system, E6600/P965/2GB DDR2 cost me over $600, and that was considered a decent mid-range system. As my primary use of computing power is Photoshop, I would definitely go for i7 even if cheaper motherboards do not become available. Reply

motherboard p45 vs x58 most x58 are 300 vs 100-120 for p45,
Ram, 6 gb of ddr3 is about 200, vs 50 or 60 for 6gb of ddr2.
For a nonstock cpu cooler you are talking 60 to 70 bucks with the i7 for it is a new socket and their is very few products for it. You can get a good cpu cooler for intel quad for 30 to 40 dollars.

Savings about 200+140+30=370

If you get things on sale you might be able to find 6gb ram for 150, cpu for 230, and you may be able to get the motherboard cheaper if you get one of the basic versions but you are still talking about 300 more.
-----
I am not saying i7 isn't worth the extra money, it is still new tech but it does show beneficial gains (on encoding, minimum frame rate on games, and overclocking) but right now the motherboards and ram is expensive. Reply

I am rounding up on the I7 side for like most people I buy things with tax (for my state charges tax on internet transactions.) In addition many people buy their equipment in stores such as fry's, microcenter, comp usa, etc.

And no I am not overpricing the ram or similar equipment. Go to Fry's, Microcenter, or some other store and you will see the prices I listed or much higher.

------

Regardless you seem to be missing the point, the original poster I was responding to was saying i7 was only 25 dollars higher, and I said that was wrong for you have to figure in the platform costs. Reply

You were right, I had forgotten about the new socket and DD3. Even so, using the parts Anandtech used, the i7 is about $187 more expensive than the PII (pun totally intended). The C2D with a Q9400 though is only $44 cheaper than the i7. Almost all of that has to do with the motherboards used here, and I'm sure you could find a combo of motherboard/CPU that would bring the price closer but that's besides the point. Reply

"In theory, the AMD design made sense. If you were running a single threaded application, the core that your thread was active on would run at full speed, while the remaining three cores would run at a much lower speed. AMD included this functionality under the Cool 'n' Quiet umbrella. In practice however, Phenom's Cool 'n' Quiet was quite flawed. Vista has a nasty habit of bouncing threads around from one core to the next, which could result in the following phenomenon (no pun intended): when running a single-threaded application, the thread would run on a single core which would tell Vista that it needed to run at full speed. Vista would then move the thread to the next core, which was running at half-speed; now the thread is running on a core that's half the speed as the original core it started out on."

Anand, read that sentence again.

The problem isn't AMD designing a chip with broken CnQ. The problem is that Microsoft, after so many years, still can't write a scheduler. The problem persists on XP too. The thread that handles the mouse would rev up, causing the chip to switch p-state. Switching p-states takes time, and because of exclusive caching on AMD chips, when the scheduler puts the same thread on different cores, it causes the L1 & L2 to be ineffective.

I have trouble in WinXP with CnQ on if I move my mouse, but not surprisingly, the same Phenom chip works like a chap in Linux. Because the scheduler isn't an idiot, and 1GHz is more than enough to handle mouse input.

AMD erred in fixing a software problem in hardware. Independent p-states saved some power if only a single thread needed the speed. Reply

Come on, guys! I like a competitive market as much as the next guy but AMD is a whole generation behind. They should have had these when the 45nm C2s came out!

AMD is lapped!

It's time for them to die!

CPU standards will only go down if they actually resort to third-party distribution!

Their video cards are always run hotter than NVIDIA and just less stable and overclockable. The only way they was able to stay alive in the race was pitting two of their GPUs against one on one board. NVIDIA hasn't even begun using DDR5 yet!

Intel and NVIDIA is not really receiving competition from AMD. AMD is just lowering standards.

This one is simply not going to cut the butter by the middle of 09. True they are cutting into the Core 2 Duo's performance advantage. It still for the most part falls short. And I didnt see this thing really challange the i7 which will be Intels flagship chip by the end of 09. I dont know about AMD's future chips. But the Phenom needs an arch replacement for AMD to compete with Intel. Reply

I would suggest an amazing PC experience is about far more than benchmarks or the performance of one component. Some benchmarks today are at risk of losing relevance to real application performance. For example, performance on 3DMark Vantage scores don’t necessarily translate into a better gaming performance. Also, the CPU-only approach to video processing performance is now thoroughly outmoded, as that should be offloaded to the GPU. The Dragon platform technology is really within the budgets people are affording themselves today and we’re doing a better job of serving the real needs of the PC market today. So I would ask you – Is $1000 or more worth the performance difference?
Reply

I am looking at these gaming benchmarks which is the most intensive thing I do on my computer. My 180 dollar E8400 is cheaper and faster.

On the server side the i7 looks more attractive for my virtualization and sql server upgrade project. Where $1000 is pennies on the dollar. Though when you factor in total system cost it is usually not even that much.

Anyways the i7 will come down in price over the course of 09 as a consumer friendly platform is released and the cost of DDR3 falls as production ramps. So it wont cost 1000 more for an i7 system for long. And I question whether an i7 system costs that much more now.

Performance isn't really any better, except in a couple of tests, than C2D chips that are 18 months old, so there's no reason to upgrade for a large chunk of us, and most of the rest will want i7.

They need a top end chip that compares to the top end i7 like the 4870 was to the GT280. And this is some way from that. It's like the 4870 was competitive to the 9800GT, and was the same price as well.

With no upgrade path this looks like one strictly for the fanboys at the moment. Reply

Ha. I'm not quite sure whether I hsould try to respond to this, but sure...

It's a non-trivial task to completely redesign the cores themselves, and I'm not even sure whether they could, say cut out the core, and drop in a new one. It's easy for us sideliners to say they need to improve, and quick, but they need to design a new one that has a much better IPC, with speed, not haste.

How is this with no upgrade path? This provides an upgrade path for boards up to AM2, which is good enough. With the AM3 versions coming out, people could drop the AM3 version into an AM2/AM2+ board, wait if necessary until DDR3 prices falls some more, and swap to a newer board with DDR3. And now they've a spare computer.

Look at the i7 prices. Friend of mine just spent 2k for an i7. Sure, he's having fun compiling and playing games with impunity, but I don't think it's the best use of money. Also, C2D is dead. You can't put an i7 into and C2D board, and there's still a good amount of people with older boards that could have a drop in boost. Reply

This is silly. If the CPU had come out in Summer '06, it would have been god-like. Quad core vs dual-core, higher clock speed, equal or better overclocking, very competitive clock-for-clock, and on a smaller and cooler process.

What you could say was that if it came out right as Peryn launched it would be a close race...but Peryn improved lots of stuff over Conroe, so it isn't fair to say AMD is 2 years behind. Reply

I think that's what Atechie's getting at. Intel took the right path by just cobbling together two dual-core processors to make a quad, while AMD spend excessive time and God only knows how much cash to develop a "monolithic" quad. Which then rolled over and played dead.

Hopefully AMD has learned from its mistakes. Otherwise Intel may not have much competition in the near future. What's AMD trading at again, these days? Reply

I dont know, this doesnt do it for me. I'm a massive AMD fan - I run a 5600+ right now, my previous CPU was an XP 2400+.

What is it now, 2 years since the Core 2 Duo was released? And AMD still cant match in clock for clock performance? After the monumental flop that was Phenom, massive delays, poor performance, high power consumption, the TLB bug, patchy backwards compatibility (my MSI K9N mobo with the Nforce 570 SLI chipset cant run AM2+ chips, but the equivalent Asus can), they launch the Phenom II, and the best I can say about it is that is that its acceptable. Acceptable. Not Phenomenal. Just acceptable. Price vs Performance wise, it gets the job done, mostly, sort of. Throw newer game engines at it and even the Q9600, that old workhouse, can beat it.

Its not that Phenom II is a terrible processor. Its not. Its just not what I expected AMD to launch, many months after the flop that was Phenom. I expected something that could at least beat a 65nm Core 2 Duo, if not a Nehalem.

As Anand hinted at, Intel is going to drop prices, which they can afford to, forcing AMD to do likewise, which they cant. AMD's die size is similar yet their margins are far smaller. Intel's next CPU will be the die shrink of Nehalem, what will AMD release? Will it even match Penryn? I can only hope. Reply

Since the Phenom II was always known to just be a die shrink with some optimizations, you were setting your hopes way too high if you thought it was going to compete directly with the i7. AMD needed this launch to keep them in the game, and it looks like it's probably just good enough to be able to do that. We probably won't be seeing any big breakthroughs from AMD until Bulldozer, so we just have to hope that this architecture will have enough headroom in it to last that long. Reply

if its too much to hope that a 2 year younger, 758 million transistor CPU could compete clock for clock with a first gen Core 2 Duo, then AMD has truly fallen to new lows. It has more transistors than i7, and yet it cant compete with a Core 2 Duo let alone i7. What happened to the sheer brilliance of the A64 days? It could beat the pants off any Pentium 4. Now the best AMD can do is barely acceptable performance at a higher clockspeed than Intel needs, all the while using a larger die than Intels.

This keeps them in the game, but it means I wont bother buying one. Why should I? Reply

Those days are over, their success was also contigent with Intel stumbling a bit and they did that with P4, with Intel firing on all cylinders, AMD at acceptable is just where they are supposed to be. Reply

It wasn't so much of a stumble, more like a face-plant into a cactus. Wearing shorts and a tshirt.

Intel fell flat with Netburst and refused to give up on it for far too long (Willamette -> Northwood -> Prescott -> Cedar Mill). I mean, the early days of P4 were horrible - it was outperformed by lower-clocked P3 chips until the increased clockspeed was finally too high for architectural differences to negate.

Into this mix AMD tossed a grenade, the A64 - followed by the X2 on the same architecture. With its IMC and superior architecture there was no way Netburst could compete. Unfortunately, AMD hasn't really done anything since then to follow through. And even today's PII isn't going to change things dramatically for them, they're still playing second fiddle to Intel's products (which means they're forced into following Intel's lead in the pricing game). Reply

Thanks for the meaningful comparison with such a wide range of processors. However, I wonder why the benchmarks are so much tilted toward the graphics/gaming world. I think that many in the SOHO world will benefit from test results of other common applications/fields such as VS Compilation, AutoCAD manipulation, Encryption, simple database indexing and even a Chess game. Reply

In the article you compare this to the 4800 series of GPUs. I actually see this as the 3800 series. It works out perfectly. The 2900 came along way late and didn't deliver, used to much power, didn't overclock well, and was just all around a looser of a card. Then the 3800 came along. Basically the same thing, but with a die shrink that allowed it to outstretch, just enough, it's predecessor. It was the first card where they got the mix right. After that came the 4800 with a big boost and even more competition. This is what i now see happening with the CPU line. The Phenom 1 was the 2900, and the Phenom II is the 3800. Getting the mix right and getting ready for the next big swing. But, as you point out, Intel isn't likely to sit back, and we can all agree that they are a much different competitor than Nvidia is. Reply

Remember? The 3870 couldn't quite catch the 8800GT and the 3850 couldn't quite match the 9600GT. While they weren't bad cards, they unfortunately also didn't give AMD the muscle to set pricing where they wanted it, instead they had to put pricing in line with how nVidia priced their offerings.

Same is happening here, with AMD pricing their chips in line with Intel's Q9400/Q9300 processors. And they may have to drop those prices if Intel cuts the Q9550/Q9400 down another peg. Reply

Rubbish theory. First of all, these cards were actually available whereas the 8800GT was in extreme short supply and thus much more expensive for many weeks, even into 2008, because it literally made everything else nvidia had to offer obsolete. I couldnt get one and settled for a 3870 for that reason.

Secondly, the 9600GT? Do you realize how much later that card came to the game than the 3850? It hit the market near the end of february. Thats almost 3 months after the launch of the 38xx part.

The 3800 line wasn't ever meant to beat the 8800 line. It just wasn't in the cards. It's purpose was to get the reins back under control. Cut the power and get back to a decent power/performance ratio as well as get equal power to a previous generation in a smaller package to help improve margins. It was a stage setter. From the first time i read about it i knew that it was just a setup for something more, something "bigger and better" that was going to come next. And then the 4800 came along and delivered the goods. I get this same feeling reading about the Phenom II. It's setting the stage. Getting about the same power (a small bump, just like the 3870 over the 2900) in a smaller package, a better power/performance ratio, etc.. This is simply a stage setting for the next big thing. The next CPU from AMD after this one is going to deliver. I'm sure of it. Reply

Nice review, always my firts site to read for a review. A bit basic on oc potential but you hint there is more to come, lets hope we don't have to wait another month like we had to wait for the 790GX board reviews.

I don't see why AMD launched the unicore @1.8ghz.

You are stating that it is because of yields, might be but shanghai launched @2.0-2.2. Phenom2 would scale a lot better performance wise against penryn with a 2,2GHZ NB speed. for sure on the BE part that is a real advantage against the q9400-Q9550

Is this to give the am3+ an additional performance gain when launched? Retail chips hit NB speeds of 2,4-2,6 easy, they also showed up to 3.5-3.6ghz oc on stock vcore, your oc gain was real low, perhaps you show in future oc review what phenom can actually do.

Since most of the people have Intel now, it'll take them only a processor upgrade if they decided to buy a better Intel processor. But if they choose to switch to AMD, they'll have to buy the mobo as well.

So for *most* people, getting a Q9400 (or Q9550 if the prices drop) will cost around $270, while getting a Phenom II 940 will cost around $470. And since this is the case for the majority, I don't see Phenom II being price competitive at all. Reply

Yeah, for people building new systems right now who don't want to spend the money on an expensive i7 mobo and DDR3, the Phenom II looks really nice. Intel probably isn't going to make any more LGA775 CPUs, whereas an AM2+ system might have more room for future upgrades with AM3 being backwards compatible. Reply

In some of the tests the two will swap places simply because they run at the same clock speed and the added cache doesn't always help performance. In those cases if the Q9450 is behind it's most likely due to normal variation between test runs.

I was on a plane flying back from Taiwan (I work in the Fab industry) and I happened to sit next to an Intel employee who had traveled to Asia for the Core i7 launch. I asked him about the small L2 cache, and he explained that these run about 300 test applications, and chose the cache amounts based on a compromise between performance (and latency) and die size. We talked a bit and he asked me how I knew so much about computer hardware, and I mentioned I'm an avid Anandtech reader. He recognized the name, and mentioned that he saw Anand argue with one of his coworkers for quite some time about the L2 cache size! Reply

AMD has indeed made some notable improvements with Phenom II and their 45nm. Reviews keep mentioning about how there is an upgrade option with Phenom II being AM2 compatible; however, what next (this is probably their last product with AM2 compatibility)? Shouldn't the reviews consider the upgrade options for Core i7/X58 with Westmere in a couple of years too? For someone who is considering a fresh build, I think that is something that should be analyzed too imo. Great review otherwise as always; the playing field if not leveled is at least starting to look competitive in a few segments!! Reply

I have been looking through forum sites for hours. This is the most complete answer I have managed to get so far. Just to make things clear: I am using an AM2+ motherboard and it supports some AM3 processors and says so in the manual. What I am confused on is the memory I will have to use with it. If I use my old AM2+ mb and put a AM3 cpu in there, do I need to run DDR2 or DDR3? I would like to use my old memory for a while to defer the cost of the processor upgrade. Reply